Imagine schools and colleges without grades, writes Mark Barnes in Education Week. “Imagine classrooms where teachers never place numbers, letters, percentages, or other labels on students’ work; where report cards don’t exist; and where the GPA has gone the way of the dinosaur.” Doug Lemov doesn’t see Utopia. He sees aristocracy. Also stupidity. Evaluations allow talented students to rise, Lemov writes. “When there is no grounds to judge, the elites” win all the goodies. “An

Educational elitism marks the modern U.S. economy, writes Victor Tan Chen in The Atlantic. College-educated winners scorn working-class Americans as “as lazy, untalented, uneducated, and unsophisticated.” A Virginia Commonwealth sociology professor, he’s the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Our culture is an extreme meritocracy, writes Chen. We believe anyone can “make it” in America. It follows that those who don’t succeed deserve their low sta